The Lifeline

A sermon for Ash Wednesday
March 2, 2022

Hello. My name is Mark. And I am a sinner. (It is at this point you all say, “hi, Mark.”)

You no doubt recognized that opening. Hello. My name is ___. And I am a ___. This phrase, first made popular by Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, has now spread to various other support groups using the same twelve steps. There are support groups for all kinds of folks, struggling, like all of us, with some sort of demon, a vice that has them in its hold. And the first thing those groups do is confess. I am a ____. Then they tell their story. The story that they all share. The story of how they started spinning out of control. We know about this format from our popular culture–TV, movies. Perhaps we also know from participating in one such group, working out those twelve steps ourselves. 

Oftentimes, these stories, testimonies really, will end something like this: “I knew I was out of control, and I needed help. So I came here.” We all know the saying, the first step toward solving a problem is recognizing you have one. Joining a support group like AA is not a failure; the exact opposite actually. It is a victory. It is a shout of defiance against our spinning out of control. It’s grabbing a lifeline when we find ourselves in the depths.

That is, in a sense, what we’re doing here today. We are coming together to start a holy Lent with confession and penitence. Together we confess that we are sinners. That our sin spins out of control. That we can’t do it on our own. That we need help, a lifeline. And that’s not a failure–by no means. It is a victory. For it is a shout of defiance against our sin spinning out of control, if we take it seriously. 

In our reading from Second Corinthians, St. Paul is entreating us to be reconciled to God. Reconciled: it means to be reconnected, to remove the barriers that divide. We are separated from God because of our sin. God never lets go of us, but we let go of God. We turn away from God and look to ourselves, to our own way, to our own desires and wills. And we begin to spin out of control. Our sin gets the best of us. We harm others. We harm ourselves. We lift ourselves up as gods and forget the One who made us. We become addicted to greed, to pride, to sloth, to lust, to envy, to gluttony, to wrath. We put up a front so no one sees what’s really under the surface, but we know the chaos within. And we spin, deeper and deeper, into the depths. 

Through it all, God has not let go of us. We feel like we’ve gone so far, like who we are and what we’ve done cannot be reconciled to God. Like God has given up on us. Perhaps we have given up on ourselves. But if we look, there’s a lifeline. There is the very hand of God, in the middle of the depths of our despair, and that hand is reaching out for you, waiting for you to grasp it. A lifeline. 

“Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation.” So says St. Paul. Your lifeline is right there. What are you waiting for? 

That lifeline looks like Christ showing up in our world, to live among us, to die for us, and to rise again so that we might rise to newness of life in him. Christ shows up in the middle of our chaos of our sin, in the middle of our spinning out of control, and he says the our storm within, “Peace! Be still.” 

What does grabbing that lifeline look like? It looks like confession. “Hello. My name is Mark. God knows that I am a sinner.” It looks like acknowledging we have fallen short. It looks like asking God for help. It looks like turning to God–that’s what “repentance” literally means, turning–to look at the loving gaze of Christ, full of love and mercy and grace and forgiveness. For you. 

In a few moments we will put ashes on our foreheads. Ashes are the traditional sign of repentance and grief. They are a reminder that we are mortals and we will die: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” More than that, they are a reminder that though we are mortals, sinners; and though we are spinning out of control, we are holding on to the One who is immortal, who calms our storm and pulls us up, who loves us and forgives us, our Lifeline. 

We learn what all of those folks in support groups know; we can’t do this on our own. We need Christ, who has given us himself for our sin, that we might become the righteousness of God, clothed in Christ’s own righteousness given for us. We need that Lifeline. We need him. And we need his Church, this Body of Christ. So we turn. We confess. We remember that we are mortals and we need God. We remember we cannot do this on our own. 

And we remember that we don’t have to do this on our own. We don’t have to pretend we have it all together. We don’t have to pretend we’re perfect. We don’t have to pretend that we aren’t spinning out of control and that we are not beset by the weightiness of our sin. We don’t have to pretend. For Christ knows. And Christ has done all that needs to be done, for us. And he is reaching out to us today: sinners, whom he loves more than anything else.